Readings

Right now I’m learning from a four-hundred-pound animal with the brain of a three-year-old child, as I train a Shetland pony to pull a cart. Ponies, like horses, are prey animals whose first instinct is to flee, so this can be a daunting and humbling task. Anything new is suspect, a first encounter with the unfamiliar unsettling.

Rocco Landesman spoke for the first time in the role of the tenth chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts at the 2009 GIA conference, Navigating the Art of Change. The Brooklyn convening was subtitled “The Recession Conference,” which Landesman, stating the obvious, translated as “the news is bad.” Nonetheless, he urged us to be optimistic. “Art is the most optimistic of activities.… There is grandeur in art. There is boldness. There is even, to use a very loaded word, the possibility for change, and we mortals need that.”

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   “Only Connect the Prose and the Passion” (12 Mb)

Jerry Yoshitomi, Meaning Matters LLC

Since the Ford Foundation’s institutional stabilization programs of the 1960s, arts funders have explored and implemented initiatives intended to promote the sustainability of arts organizations. Funding approaches, programs, and special terminology have been developed in support of the arts’ economic and social contributions to society. Artists and arts organizations are evaluated on the basis of their fiscal prudence and community contributions as well as artistic merit.

Ever since Ponce de Leon sought the Fountain of Youth in 1513 near present-day Saint Augustine, newcomers have sought to inscribe their personal mythologies on Florida’s mutable landscape. Before Walt Disney turned central Florida wholly over to fantasy with the Magic Kingdom, South Florida had Miami, the Magic City, so named because it became a city almost overnight, without having been a town.